April 9, 2008

Lt. Cmdr. Matthew Diaz

Once again, a military attorney (JAG) wins this week's BuzzFlash Wings of Justice Award, and once again the nominator is a former military lawyer (JAG), Stephen A. Justino, who writes:

Former Navy Lt. Cmdr. Matthew Diaz served as a lawyer for prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The superior officer who evaluated him before he left for Cuba had described him as "the consummate naval officer" and "a stellar leader of unquestionable integrity." Those words turned out to be prophetic.

In the summer of 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court Supreme handed down a landmark decision -- Rasul v. Bush. In that case the Supreme Court ordered the Bush administration to provide habeas corpus rights -- including the right to legal counsel -- to the Guantánamo prisoners. By the winter of 2005, more than six months after that order came down, neither the Pentagon nor the Justice Department had taken any action to obey it. Indeed, Diaz believed that they had no intention of obeying it at all.

Realizing that the system at Gitmo had been designed to conceal prisoner abuse and undermine human rights, Lt. Cmdr. Diaz "blew the whistle" on the Bush administration, printing out a 39-page list of all 550 prisoners at Gitmo, and mailing them to a civil liberties attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City.

That act ultimately resulted in Lt. Cmdr. Diaz being court marshaled, and imprisoned in the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., and the forfeiture of his military job and pension, and may yet lead to the permanent loss of his license to practice law.

As Joe Conason says in his Salon article about Matthew Diaz: "like a number of his higher-ranking JAG superiors, he has proved that the most reliable defenders of the Constitution these days are not in the civilian ranks of government but among the senior military officers. It was the neoconservative law professors and political bureaucrats who authorized, encouraged and justified the worst depredations against human and constitutional rights, from Abu Ghraib to Gitmo. It was the men and women in uniform who warned against those policies and tried to amend them . . ."

* * *

HONOREES  |  NOMINATE  |  ABOUT  |  HOME

Wings of Justice is a project of BuzzFlash.com.
Support our work by donating or buying a book, DVD or CD.